As you may know, you can easily afford the costs of a dedicated server by just creating virtual machines on it for yourself and your friends. Just rent a few additional IPs (usually around 1€/IP), et voila! Everyone has his own server.
The easiest method to achieve this is using Proxmox – I’d prefer that over VMware, Xen etc.; A tutorial for setting it up on a existing debian installation can be found here:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Squeeze
Something you should know: If you don’t want to fight with the network configuration on both host machine and VMs, better create containers (CTs) instead of virtual machines (VMs). Although you then may be restricted to use Linux distributions and have less possible settings, it will surely save you a lot of stress, time and effort.
And – when creating containers, you’ll most likely do this with templates. Note that proxmox by default seems to only offer 32 bit (i386) templates of various Linux distributions, for whatever reason. Download the 64 bit (amd64) templates to /var/lib/vz/template/cache from http://download2.proxmox.com/appliances/system/ before you create your containers, so you can select the desired template in Proxmox.
Thanks for your tips about using proxmox CT’s and Templates 64bits
Hi Pete,
I have a Server rented at Webtropia running Proxmox and a pack of 10 additional IPs. The problem is that we could only use the IP addresses within the main subnet of the server. Assigning one of the additional IPs to a VM leads only to a Network unreachable. I have assigned the VM to vmbr0, followed the usual tips (proxy arp, etc.) and tested a lot of configurations suggested in the support forums. My hope is that you could provide me with a sample of your configuration as you seem to have a running setup at Webtropia.
Many thanks in advance, your advice will be highly appreciated.
Cheers,
Dirk
Hi Dirk,
of course, I’ll email you my /etc/network/interfaces – and if you need anything else, let me know.
Unfortunately I’m not sure if that will help you. I had huge troubles setting the network up when I tried to assign the IPs to my VMs.
Asked Webtropia support – they recommended me to just create CTs (Containers) instead.
When doing that, you just need to enter the IP in the proxmox webconfig network tab – that’s all, and it works out of the box.
Only disadvantage I found so far is that you seem to cannot get Windows running with that method.
Greetings,
Pete